Movie notes: Not everyone (hearts) ‘Watchmen’

Allan Craig, 17, laughs as his friend Russel Torres, 16, puts glasses over Rorschach mask at a theater in York, Pa. before a midnight showing of ‘Watchmen’ on Thursday. Not surprisingly, fans were more enamored of the film than critics.

I knew from reading reviews other than Roger Ebert’s last week that not all critics were as enamored of “Watchmen” as he was. A check of the Tomatometer this morning at RottenTomatoes.com confirms that.

Though the film scored a 65 (reflecting the percentage of positive reviews), which is good enough for a “Fresh” rating (60 is the cutoff between “Fresh” and “Rotten”), lots of mainstream heavyweights didn’t like it. It received a 43 (reflecting 16 reviews for, 21 against) from the scribes counted in the “Top Critics” section.

For every four-star tout from the likes of Ebert (“another bold exercise in the liberation of the superhero movie”), there’s an equally strong dissent, like this from his Windy City colleague, Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune: “(Director) Zack Snyder’s bloated screen adaptation will go over best with fanboys, fangirls, fanmen and fanwomen who give high marks for slavish fidelity to the source material.”

However, the fangirl I know pretty well, who saw it at a minute after midnight Thursday night, pronounced it wonderful.

“The movie was quite faithful to the book in everything but the ending, which I’m kind of on the fence about,” my daughter, Amanda, wrote Friday morning in responding to my email. “Jackie Earle Haley (the creepy dude from ‘Little Children’ who plays Rorschach) is fantastic. Almost Oscar-worthy. And the music is genius  in a lot of scenes the music is era-appropriate pop instead of an orchestral score. You should definitely see it, if only to fulfill your duties as pop culture observer/commentator.”

OK, OK. WIll do. I just wasn’t in the mood for a dark, three-hour trip to the multiplex last weekend. And I haven’t read the graphic novel yet.

Anyway, the folks who voted with their money and feet pronounced it a success. It did $55.7 million opening weekend, which various analysts said was satisfactory, given the film’s length (which cuts down on showings) and and the non-graphic-novel-reading public’s lack of familiarity with the characters (i.e., no Batman or Spider-Man). And the IMAXs of the country were reportedly packed.

It’ll be interesting to see what it does this weekend. The fanboys can’t sustain the opening-weekend take, no matter how many times they see it. It’ll take a lot of curious nonfans to keep the box office from falling off drastically. The good news for “Watchmen” is there’s not much competition this weekend  just the Disney flick “Race to Witch Mountain,” the raunchy teen road comedy “Miss March” and the horror remake “The Last House on the Left.” None is likely to take business away from “Watchmen.”